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Robots In Amazon's Warehouses Are Already Making a Huge Difference (qz.com)
Amazon acquired Kiva, a robotics company for a sum of $775 million in 2012, and started to use robots in its warehouses in late 2014. At the time, the idea was that it will make inventory management more efficient. It's actually doing an impressive job. The "clip to ship" process used to take around 60-75 minutes when human employees were taking care of things, now the robots are doing the same job in 15 minutes. From a Quartz report: These robots are not only more efficient but they also take up less space than their human counterparts. That means warehouse design can eventually be modified to have more shelf space and less wide aisles. At the end of the third quarter of 2015, Amazon was using 30,000 Kiva robots across 13 warehouses. Each Kiva-equipped warehouse can hold 50% more inventory per square foot than centers without robots. In turn, the company's operating costs have been sliced by 20% -- or almost $22 million -- per warehouse. If Kiva robots are dispatched to the rest of the 110 Amazon warehouses, the tech giant could save almost $2.5 billion, according to Deutsche Bank. However, since it takes $15-$20 million to install robots in each warehouse, the one-time savings is expected to be closer to $800 million.
We must at all costs keep them from having access to rifle emojis!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Next step should be to design robots to buy stuff online, otherwise with all jobs automated who is going to buy from Amazon?
The robot also doesn't steal the inventory, spend time babbling to friends, check facebook, twitter, etc, doesn't want a raise in pay when the company is experiencing bad times, doesn't start reproducing with other higher/lower ranking employees, will not steal data, can't be bribed, etc, beg the supervisor for a promotion, etc.
But don't worry, continue to oppose progress.
Bury your head in the sand and shout NO CUTBACKS, NO CONCESSIONS, and keep demanding that pay always goes up economic circumstances be damned.
People complain about inventory pickers' and shippers' jobs being lost instead of complaining that inventory picking and shipping for Amazon are grueling jobs that are too physically demanding and don't pay enough. Who wants to hear the same complaints over and over? Now we have a variety.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing, and turnover is high anyhow (it's a shitty job, by all accounts).
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
Eventually someone will solve the "picking problem" end-to-end, and then I'm sure those jobs will be gone.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In about 1982, when I was seven years old, my grandpa told me to study computers and robotics, because that's where the jobs would be when I grew up. He was not wrong.
LOL, when my brain tried to type "grew", my fingers, out of habit, typed "grep". It seems I HAVE been working with computers a lot.
I've spent many years in the AWS (Automated Warehousing Solutions) industry. I've seen automated warehouses with huge industrial cranes moving 500 pound drums and tiny little pill box pickers. I've seen systems run 24x7 with almost no human intervention unless a robot drops something. How the hell did it take them this long to get some basic pickers running.
I can only think their warehouses are just a clusterfuck of different items in the same bin or whatever they call it. If so their inventory system was shit to begin with.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
One solution would be to have the robots be more assertive in taking over a human's job. Instead of firing the person, let the robot kill whoever it displaces.
"Savings" also means "less money for workers to spend in their local economy".
We're making radical changes to the whole cycle of "wages => purchases => revenues => wages => ..." cycle. Yes, it has happened before, but never at this speed, never at this timescale, never at this scale of number of jobs. This may not end well.
Prime doesn't help. Amazon routinely breaks the "Guaranteed Delivery By..." guarantee shown on the checkout page, even for Prime members. The standard compensation if you bother to pester them about it is to extend Prime membership by 1 month.
However, these count against you, and Amazon will eventually stop giving you free Prime. If you have too many demerits on your account (complaining about slow/delayed shipping, returning defective items, getting a price match, etc.) Amazon will straight ban your account.
here's your problem, pally. you had the mode switch set to EVIL.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Prime doesn't help. Amazon routinely breaks the "Guaranteed Delivery By..." guarantee shown on the checkout page, even for Prime members. The standard compensation if you bother to pester them about it is to extend Prime membership by 1 month.
However, these count against you, and Amazon will eventually stop giving you free Prime. If you have too many demerits on your account (complaining about slow/delayed shipping, returning defective items, getting a price match, etc.) Amazon will straight ban your account.
I am in no way trying to offend you because of bad service to you.
Every time i have ordered from Amazon, it came earlier than the promised date.
Just saying.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
Pretty sure everyone displaced found jobs in the robot service field for the net job loss was 0. That's how it works, /. told me so.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
In the longer term, is trapping people in a crappy job they get nothing from as an individual, and which they know could be done better and cheaper by a machine, but which they are required to keep doing because some rich executive wants to show how much they pity the poor really a good solution?
The problem isn't the jobs going away, it's the lack of other options to replace them.
Society has always gained net benefit from efficiency. Making a given product, or delivering a given service, with less labor, less raw materials, and /or less energy has always helped us more than it has hurt us, as a society. We call that "technology", and it's a good thing.
People are complaining that the rate of this change is a bad, but I've read books making this same claim written 40 years ago, and 8- years ago, and I'm sure people were writing it 120 years ago too.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
That problem was actually solved some time ago - for years, Frito-Lay's bigger plants have had automated cranes to grab pallets from the shelves in 10-story warehouses, deposit them into a ground-level circulation conveyor where they're picked up by automated forklifts, then brought to the buffer areas where they're de-palletized and small robots then run the pick boxes to the appropriate place on the picking lines, and the shipping boxes are routed via conveyor automatically to the appropriate loading dock for deadloaded (non-palletized) bulk shipments. For palletized loads, the fork trucks are sent directly to the loading dock. Not all of their plants have the robot forklifts, and in the fully-automated plants they still have man-driven lifts, but even where the manual lifts are still in use they've seen *huge* efficiency gains with the system. The tricky part there is staging the inventory and product flow such that the oldest product always ships first. They're also starting to implement automated loading for the trucks even though an experienced loader is scary-fast.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Now if you want a hamburger, you don't want the bun heated with microwaves, so an infrared heater might be better. Then you've got to invent a way to properly combine the bun, the meat patty, and the lettuce, etc. It doesn't need to be anything general purpose.
It also needs to be replenished with ingredients, waste from this ingredients shipped away, to be sanitized regularly since it's serving food that could go off and kill people, have a backup so a failure mode doesn't bring the store to a halt, and it needs to be smart enough to know when it hasn't properly prepared the food so it can handle customer complaints.
Oh, the store still needs to be cleaned, restocked, lightbulbs changed, cigarette butts picked up in the parking lot, etc. Otherwise you haven't removed enough humans from the roster to make it worthwhile.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I know no one really dreams of working in a warehouse filling boxes, or in a factory making steel or whatever. But, society here in the first world has been based for decades on the idea of wealth transfer and stable lifetime employment. Some examples:
- 30 year fixed mortgages are designed to be painful in the beginning but manageable over time because of increasing income.
- Manufacturers give auto loans with the assumption that people have the monthly income stream needed to pay them off over an extended time.
- Retirement under the pension system is dead for most, but for the lucky few, pension based retirement's payoff is dependent on years of service.
- Retirement under the DIY 401(k)/IRA system requires lifetime, increasing contributions commensurate with your income to ensure stable retirement income later.
- Car and other heavy goods manufacturers assume people will be able to purchase replacement heavy goods throughout their lives, and maybe someone who's worked a long time will buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet for example.
- Basically every consumer business relies on people being able to purchase more and better things over time, again due to increasing income.
I really wonder what Amazon, home builders, supermarkets, car manufacturers, etc. will do when almost everyone cannot depend on a reasonably stable work life anymore. Personally, the reason why I buy things is because I'm somewhat confident that I will have a job for the near term. If I didn't have that confidence, I'd close my wallet as any other rational actor would do. Now, combine this fact with the slow creep of unemployment both from the low and the high end. Examples:
- Robots replacing fast food workers, warehouse workers, factory workers
- Cloud and automation replacing IT workers
- Offshoring replacing IT and software developers
Since socialism will never take hold in the US until things are at the French Revolution level, what are we going to do with all the unemployable people? It's not nice to say, but there are a group of people who are absolutely incapable of doing anything beyond warehouse work or factory work. Heck, there are corporate employees who are incapable of doing anything outside a narrow processing-type job description. For these people, I do kind of wish for a return to the pre-automation days when you had 10,000+ people working in a steel mill, or another 10,000+ just churning out paperwork at a corporate job. Those people earned a decent middle class salary, and had a good life. I doubt anyone growing up now is going to have it so good.
People have also been saying "this time it's different" since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
ll that's required is for some need to arise that requires more/better-paid people to support these new efficiencies
Not specifically "these new efficiencies", just "some new need to arise". Humans want more it's our nature. Every step along the way of technological advancement has produced a wave of some new sort of job, doing or making something that previously only the rich could afford, but now there's demand for at vastly larger scale.
Almost no one today in the US has a job as a farmer or manufacturing worker (while we grow more food, and manufacture more stuff than ever) , yet there are plenty of service jobs and the like.
I wish I could predict what the next wave of jobs would be (my investment portfolio wouldn't look so sad if I could), but I do expect personal services to flourish.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The difference is that the Kiva robots effectively fit the niche where there are a large number of skus and small number of picks per sku per day.
True. The situation I have experience with is the other way around, where there are about 10,000 or so SKUs, and a few dozen of them get hundreds of thousands of picks per day. It's also different in that it's integrated with the production line, which offers both advantages and disadvantages.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
This time it might actually be different, though, because the addition of cheap computers greatly increases the number of tasks that can be automated. We're already pretty close to the point where people on the left half of the bell curve are completely driven out of the job market, and the service jobs that are growing are high-skill occupations like doctors and software developers.
There are still hair stylists and manicurists, and they're not going anywhere. There are still the skilled trades, and they're not going anywhere. I expect a boom in jobs like decorator and home theater installer and fashion consultant and everything like that: jobs that are currently for the fairly rich, where both fashion sense and the fiddly bits of getting everything in place to look good can be left to someone who's passionate about that particular sort of thing.
The more things get cheap, the more taste and arrangement matters for social status, and the more people can on the same money afford to pay someone else to do it for them. And almost everyone is a "hobby expert" on something.
It's much shallower than doctor or lawyer (both of which are becoming less-than-great jobs, BTW, be a dentist or vet instead). Look to personal services only the 1% can afford today to be far more common tomorrow, since that's the pattern throughout history.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.